Map of the Internet

Posted on March 10, 2011

PEER 1 Hosting approached me in 2010 with a concept for a promotional poster—a map of the internet. Something that would be visually striking, and based on real data. We quickly agreed that the CAIDA dataset of autonomous system connectivity would be an ideal basis for the image.

I developed an approach to drawing this complex graph based on the concept of eigenvector centrality. The connectivity of the most central nodes in the network (the internet backbone) becomes visible, as does the clustering of less-central nodes around them. The 200 most central autonomous systems are listed in an index which gives their location on the map grid.